Topics

Elliott Stein

Latest Stories

When João César Monteiro died, it was front-page news in Europe, where the Portuguese director is considered a major figure. But since his work is virtually unknown here, BAM is now making amends with a 10-film retro, running from Ap...

Dir. Jean Renoir (1935). Not a single scene was made in a studio in Renoir's naturalistic treatment of a melodramatic story based on a real rural police case in the South of France involving an immigrant Italian worker. There is great authenticity...

Dir. Jean Renoir (1938). One of Renoir's blackest films transfers the action of Emile Zola's novel to the present day and supplies French cinema's working class hero Jean Gabin with one of his finest roles as a locomotive engineer, an ordinary man...

Dir. Jean Renoir (1931). Idiosyncratic Michel Simon gives a bravura performance as a henpecked unhappily-married clerk led into a life of crime by his love for a prostitute. In his first great talkie, Renoir takes a simple melodrama and turns it i...

Dir. Louis Milestone (1931). The first screen version of Hecht and MacArthur's play set in a cynical newspaper world suffers from uneven direction but comes alive every minute suave Adolphe Menjou is on screen as cold-blooded Chicago editor Walter...